Parting Ways

*ch00-frontmatter 9/1/04 2:09 PM Page iii Parting Way s The Crisis in German-American Relations Stephen F. Szabo brookings institution press Washington, D.C. *ch00-frontmatter 9/1/04 2:09 PM Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 A “Poisoned” Relationship 1 2 From Unlimited Solidarity to Reckless Adventurism: Responding to 9-11 15 3 Partners in Contradiction: From the Election to War 34 4 Kulturkampf: A Clash of Strategic Cultures 52 5 Is It Bush or Is It America? German Images of the United States 79 6 Welcome to the Berlin Republic 104 7 From Alliance to Alignment 131 Appendix Chronology of German-American Relations from September 11, 2001, through March 20, 2003 154 Notes 159 Index 187 *ch01 9/1/04 1:48 PM Page 1 1 A “Poisoned” Relationship How can you use the name of Hitler and the name of the president of the United States in the same sentence?” demanded the U.S. national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Only a few days earlier, on September 18, 2002, just before voters were to go to the polls in the most closely contested election in German history, Germany’s justice minister, Herta Däubler- Gmelin, had compared the methods of Bush with those of Hitler, charging that he was deliberately manufacturing a foreign crisis in Iraq to divert the American people’s attention away from domestic economic problems. Rice continued:“An atmosphere has been created in Germany that is in that sense poisoned.”1 Her outrage, shared widely by the American public, revealed how strained relations had become between formerly close allies. The German-American split was part of a larger crisis in transatlantic relations that began with the end of the cold war, increased with the com- ing to power of the Bush administration, and erupted with ferocity in the fall of 2002 over the war in Iraq. It reached its peak during the winter and spring of 2003. This proved to be a watershed year in a relationship that had been of central importance to the United States since the end of World War II. What began as a temporary tactical shift of the German chancellor toward Paris and away from Washington came to take on a more strategic significance. Europe had taken priority over Germany’s transatlantic tie with the United States. American power was now regarded with suspicion, not only as a stabilizing force in international relations. If the cold war ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, the post–cold war period in the German-U.S. relationship ended with the war in Iraq. Humpty Dumpty had fallen, and the pieces 1 *ch01 9/1/04 1:48 PM Page 2 2 A “Poisoned” Relationship could not be put back together again. From the Bush administration’s point of view, Germany had become part of what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was to label “old Europe,”taking part for the first time in an active coalition against an undertaking that a U.S. administration thought was in its vital interest, in this case a preventive war against Iraq. From the German point of view, the legacy of the war in Iraq was that the biggest problem now confronting world order is U.S. power. The Stakes The current rift between Germany and the United States should be viewed as the death of the canary in the coal mine, an early warning to both sides of the dangers of taking the other for granted and of assuming that their relationship is strong enough to withstand bad politics and bad diplomacy. It is also a reminder of the need to avoid both personalizing and sentimentalizing relations between states and to think instead in terms of both mutual interests and self-interest rather than friendship. The devaluation of the German-American relationship by both sides that followed the end of the cold war was inevitable, but if the relationship is further mishandled it could lead to a more open and even deeper split that would have major consequences for both countries, which are still important to each other in many key areas. Germany matters because Europe still matters. Europe may no longer be a high security priority for the United States, but it remains its most important and an indispensable partner in all significant global issues confronting Washington in the new century—the global economy, the environment, human rights and democracy, international development policy, high tech- nology, and a range of other issues. As Samuel Huntington has pointed out, Europe is “the closest thing to an equal that the United States faces at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”2 Europe is not only a partner but a potential competitor. The European Union (EU), the heart of Europe, has the population base, the economic and technological capabilities, and the cultural and political attributes of a global power. In Joseph Nye’s term, Europe has the “soft power” that has increas- ingly become the basis of international influence in the postmodern world. As Nye rightly observes, “The key question in assessing the challenge posed by the EU is whether it will develop enough political and social-cultural cohesion to act as one unit on a wide range of international issues, or whether it will remain a limited grouping of countries with strongly differ- ent nationalisms and foreign policies.”3 *ch01 9/1/04 1:48 PM Page 3 A “Poisoned” Relationship 3 Germany, in turn, is central to the answer that Europe provides to this question. Working in tandem with France, it has long been the engine of European integration. Now that it is a unified country, questions have been raised about its continuing commitment to the project to build a more unified and coherent Europe. Will Germany remain on the postmodern track that has seen it deemphasize its national interests in favor of deeper Euro- pean integration, or will its return to “normality” mean a return to a more nationalist orientation? And how will Germany balance its commitment to building a unified and cohesive European Union with the danger that its other compelling interest—enlarging the EU—could also fatally dilute Europe by expanding it to the point that it becomes so diverse as to lose its capacity to act politically? While Germany’s future course remains open, there is no doubt that Ger- many’s future will be crucial to Europe’s. However, whatever course Germany takes will be influenced by European as well as domestic factors. This is an especially plastic time in both European and German history. The European Union is engaged in creating something resembling a constitution at a time when it is confronted with redefining its identity in terms of both enlargement (Where does Europe end?) and in terms of immigration (What does it mean to be German or French in a time of both globalization and demographic stagnation in Europe, which has resulted in an influx or foreign residents and new citizens?). Meanwhile Germany is having to reshape its identity in the face of both European and German unification, while it deals with a growing foreign-born population of its own. Old fears of a return to what John Foster Dulles once called “the firetrap of European nationalism”—a firetrap that engulfed the United States many times in the twentieth century, from Sarajevo in 1919 to Kosovo in 1999—are largely gone, thanks to the success of the project to unify Europe. While a united Europe could become a peer competitor in the future, the prospect of European fragmentation and drift, however remote, holds greater danger for Washington than European unity. Yet there remains a real possibility that as Europe defines itself, it will do so against the United States, and here again Germany is crucial. During the crisis over war in Iraq, Germany abandoned its traditional policy of positioning itself between Washington and Paris to create a countercoalition with Russia and France against the United States. That was an entirely new tactic and it has major significance. If German lead- ers follow the French road toward an independent Europe that can act as a counterbalance to the American hegemon, there will be a real prospect of a split in the West, with implications for the broader world order and particu- *ch01 9/1/04 1:48 PM Page 4 4 A “Poisoned” Relationship larly for the U.S. position in it. It will further provoke the United States and feed the inclination of Washington—or at least of the Bush administration— to go it alone and to follow a “policy of disaggregation” that attempts to play on and exacerbate European divisions. If continued, this policy, which devel- oped during the crisis over Iraq, will risk encouraging either the formation of a European counter power or the fragmentation of Europe. The stakes also are crucial for Berlin. With the loosening of the transatlantic ties, questions about German identity and its role in Europe, all of which had seemed settled during the cold war period, are now reopened. For the past five decades, Germany has shaped itself in the American image, subordinated its security policy to that of the United States, and used its ties to Washington to project its interests and power in a way that was not seen as threatening to its neighbors. The split over Iraq that occurred in Europe between a more pro-Bush faction led by Britain and a countercoalition led by France and Germany threatens many of the pillars of the success of Ger- man policy and opens up the possibility that the United States will form a new countercoalition against Germany in Europe.

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